Into the Wild: The Urban Firefighters on the Front Lines of California's Wildfire Crisis

When a fire tore through a large commercial building in the heart of Oakland’s Chinatown last month, Oakland Fire Department Captain Christopher Foley was one of the first on the scene, leading the battalion that quashed the flames within just a few hours.

That intense but brief firefight was a marked contrast to his experience the previous week on a strike team battling the massive SCU Lighting Complex, a blaze that burned for well over a month, devouring nearly 400,000 acres on the southeastern edges of the Bay Area before it was fully contained on Oct. 1 — one of the largest wildfires in California history.

“The fires in the urban areas, everybody is moving very, very quickly, whereas the wildland fires are more of a methodical [process],” said Foley, who’s based at Station 4 on International Boulevard. “You might be working four days ahead of the fire.”

And when you’re working a wildfire, you don’t get any breaks.

“It’s a different pace because you are working literally for 24 hours straight,” he said. “You are on your feet, working a tool, working a saw, putting in hose line for 24 hours. Whereas, the fire [in Chinatown], which is the biggest fire the city has seen in this calendar year, the fire is over in two hours.”

For years, Foley has helped battle wildfires as part of California’s mutual aid system, a sprawling network of first responders from scores of local fire departments across the state, called on to assist Cal Fire and federal crews when extra hands are needed — which is almost always, these days.

First conceived in the 1950s, California’s Fire and Rescue Mutual Aid System is one of the oldest and most robust of its kind. And as fires here continue to grow bigger and more ferocious, the state is relying on it more than ever before.

In recent years, Foley, 51, has gotten used to being deployed for weeks at a time, fighting some of the state’s biggest and most destructive blazes, often having to hit the road with his Oakland engine crew within an hour of getting the call.

That experience includes the 2018 Camp Fire, which incinerated most of the northern California town of Paradise, killing 85 people.

“Having to do two-plus weeks of search and recovery efforts after two days of fighting fire is something I hope I never have to do again,” he said.

But despite the physical and emotional toll of the work, Foley, who has two young children, said he looks forward to heading into the wild.

“I love going out there. It’s just a whole different world — the challenge, it’s just a totally different playing field,” he said. “And then also it’s just an interesting opportunity to go help communities in need that you didn’t even know were on the map.”

California’s fire season started alarmingly early this year, thanks to intensely dry conditions and a barrage of lightning strikes in mid-August that ignited hundreds of blazes across the state. By the first week of October, flames had charred a record 4 million acres — more than double the area that burned all of last year — with about two months still left to go in the season. That unprecedented early onslaught of huge, simultaneous blazes, coupled with COVID-19 restrictions that have sidelined many inmate firefighter crews and other first responders, are stretching the state’s emergency resources.

“Definitely the drawdown of resources was extraordinarily apparent,” Foley said of his recent stint on the SCU Complex. “You know, a fire of that size by itself would probably have 3,000 people or more, and there were less than 2,000. So, with resources being spread so thin, it was very complicated because we just don’t have the ability to move as quickly as you might under different circumstances.”

For mutual aid assistance, the Oakland Fire Department deploys up to five of its engines, with 25 firefighters and command staff at any one time. This season, Foley said, the department has consistently “maxed out” its resources, with crews currently deployed to four fires around the state, including the Glass Fire in North Bay.

“We have a minimum staffing level [in Oakland] that we maintain regardless of the circumstances, regardless of what’s going on around us,” he said. But that often requires firefighters at home to work extra shifts to fill in the gaps, he said, and gives those returning from wildland assignments less time to recuperate. “As the seasons get longer and longer, you definitely do start to feel it.”

In late summer, at the peak of the fire siege, more than 800 engines and over 3,000 personnel, mostly from city and county fire departments, were helping battle blazes across the state, said Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the California Office of Emergency Services, which oversees the mutual aid system.

“The mutual aid system is a really critical part of our ability to respond to wildfires,” he said. “It’s basically surge capacity for the state’s firefighting ability, particularly when we have great need, like this year.”

In addition to help from local departments, California has also become accustomed to requesting firefighting support from out of state, and even internationally, Ferguson said, noting that at one point in September, more than 18,000 firefighters — including those from local jurisdictions, National Guard troops and crews from Canada and Mexico — were battling blazes across the state.

There’s no doubt that current conditions are stretching the state’s firefighting system “to its limits,” he said. “There’s fears of what the impacts are on our system as a whole.”

That comes as little surprise to James Bowron, an OFD battalion chief from Station 17 in East Oakland, who in 2016, was the incident commander for the deadly Ghost Ship fire.

“We did the math the other day. I think out of [the last] 42 days, I was deployed for 36 of them,” said Bowron, 43, who recently returned from two weeks on a strike team fighting the El Dorado Fire in San Bernardino National Forest. Shortly before that, he had worked the SCU Complex.

“I think everybody is pretty tired. I mean, back-to-back big fires; [the] season has been pretty relentless,” he said. “It’s really starting to tax the mutual aid system to the point that I haven’t seen before.”

Bowron had his first exposure to wildland firefighting more than 30 years ago, as part of a youth program in his hometown of Kenwood in rural Sonoma County, a region plagued by wildfires in recent years. At 18, just out of high school, he started working seasonally for Cal Fire before eventually finding longer-term jobs in city departments.

Bowron acknowledges that he’s hired to serve the city of Oakland, but feels duty bound to fight fires wherever help is needed.

“The way I look at it is that, you know, even though each of us, we represent the city we work for, when the state gets to a level like this, I mean, really, we do represent a state fire department,” he said. “These are the times where borders and boundaries drop and it’s all hands on deck and everyone has got to do their part to help bring these emergencies under control.”

But that comes with some serious sacrifices. Bowron has three young daughters who he often doesn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to when having to deploy at a moment’s notice.

“It’s very taxing on the family,” said Bowron, whose wife, a nurse at a Vallejo hospital, is also steeped in emergency work. “I have been very upfront with our daughters about what I do and the importance of sacrifice for the community … And they’re aware of that. But, you know, still, it’s not easy to have dad be gone for long stretches of time. I mean, there are definitely times where I get on the phone and they ask me when I’m coming home. And, you know, I’ve got to be like, ‘I’m coming home when the fire’s done.'”

But even as California’s wildfires intensify year over year, claiming additional ground and threatening more communities, Bowron remains optimistic that the state will be able to meet the challenge.

“Our state mutual aid system is probably the best. I mean, it’s really good,” he said. “It’s probably a blessing and a curse that just by the sheer amount of times we get to do it, we get pretty good at it.”

Bowron pauses for moment.

“Is it sustainable? It kind of has to be. We don’t really have a lot of other choices.”